Getting wrong characters in PSE 8 (Mac OSX)

Question

I think my problem is best described by reference to these two sample galleries:
Old gallery (PSE 2.0, Mac OS X.4):
http://www.huthyfs.com/axes
Note that é, e-acute, (images 2,3,4) is propery represented.
New gallery, same images (PSE 8.0, Mac OS X.6):
http://www.huthyfs.com/newaxes/instruments
(Version 2.0 does not work with Snow Leopard)
In Firefox you can choose either UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 and make the e-acute stink in two different ways. (The source code for
the html pages indicates UTF-8).
Swedish characters, like å (å), ä (ä), and ö (ö), are also distorted into square roots of various symbols.
I've asked Adobe Support about this problem and they've asked me TWICE to again describe the problem, explain what gallery program
I'm talking about (Bridge, is there any other?) and how I start it (choose Create Web Phot gallery, under File, is there any other way?).
After I've answered their questions twice they no longer  answer. Anyone here who can explain how to solve this apparently simple problem?
Or is there simply no solution? In that case I've wasted the equivalent of     $140 on a completely worthless product.

Answer 1

The computer is a recent iMac, but not the very latest model currently advertised on Apple's homepage.
Model Name: iMac
  Model Identifier: iMac9,1
  Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
  Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz
The OS is Snow Leopard, X.6.1. I have a Swedish keyboard, including characters like å,ä,ö, the last three letters of the Swedish alphabet.
å follows p. ö,ä follow l.
Apart from that it is the international standard,  I suppose: QWERTY ... There may be other differences from an American keyboard, e.g. I doubt that
shift-4 is a Euro sign, €,  in the US ...
When typing captions into File Info  these Swedish characters were translated into their proper html equivalents on the html pages, å ä ö in Elements 2.0
(which uses ISO-8859-1).
é (é) is alt-e. It's not a Swedish character, but it's used in proper names and imported words. When typed into
File Info in Elements 8 they are represented as these atrocious square root symbols in the html source. That should be visible in the sample gallery I linked to, "View Source".
When opening Bridge ("Create Web Photo Gallery") I can set "Language" and "Keyboard". The former is the language of the instructions, and I've chosen
English. I've set the latter to Svenska (Swedish) which does not help. There must be some option that I've overlooked.